


Ward Dowling

by Macdicilla



Category: Good Omens (Radio Adaptation), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: This poor kid is so screwed up, honestly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2015-08-18
Packaged: 2018-04-15 10:42:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4603722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Macdicilla/pseuds/Macdicilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Warlock Dowling has grown up, and his university classmates try to weasel some childhood stories out of him. Some rather alarming stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ward Dowling

If you get Warlock Dowling drunk enough (though he goes by Ward these days, no one has called him Warlock in ten years) he will tell you stories about his childhood.

Presently, we find him at a pub, though they are called bars in America unless they’re Irish, with a handful of university schoolmates. There’s Maggie from programming, Jack and Chad from calc two, and Talia from God knows where. They’re not very close friends, but they enjoy each other’s company. Talia, especially, enjoys Ward’s stories.

He won’t tell them while sober.

They’re at the bar and Talia insists to the others they gotta hear about the nanny. Mostly in whispers. The next round is on her. She buys two pitchers, one of beer and one of discreet ginger ale. Ward gets his own pitcher because it’s his birthday sometime this month. The others share the second one. He thanks her kindly.

Ward’s a real lightweight, a skinny kid, though both his parents are built like football players (the sort of football where the players have legs like like bears and throw the ball with their hands.)

Once he’s mostly done with the pitcher, at a nudge from Talia, Maggie sweetly asks what he was like as a kid. He squints at her. Not because he’s suspicious, far from it, but because for the twenty-fifth time he’s idly trying to place her accent. It’s not from any part of the United States, and Jack says it can’t be from part of the United Kingdom, because what British person would name their child Maggie? (No one has the heart to tell him about Tories.) It’s a bastard accent like his own, Ward decides, where the consonants are blurry but the vowels are like polished glass.

“What was I like as a kid? Hmm. Real brat, I’d say. Spoiled rotten.”  
“How spoiled, Ward?” Purrs Talia.   
He squints at her too.  
“I told you already.”  
“Tell me.” Says Jack.   
Ward fumbles for words for a while and then falls silent.   
“Servants.” He pronounces after a while, sounding a bit bashful. “We had them.”  
“Oh, okay.” Says Chad, uncomfortable with the endeavour to extract The Story. Talia keeps mouthing the word ‘nanny’ at him, but he won’t bring it up. She hisses in frustration and turns to Maggie.

“D'you ever have a cook?” She asks innocently.   
“Nuh.” He answers. “We did have a maid, though, and she’d make lunch every day too.”  
“A cook-maid,” says Jack, “or cmaid.”  
Ward starts laughing. What a silly word.   
“A cmaid! Yes, her name was Hannah. An’ a porter an’ guards an’ a gard'ner.”

Talia makes the ‘go on’ gesture with her hand. He shakes his head and refills his glass.

“Nuh. Gotta tell y'all about the gard'ner first.”

Everyone else looks at Talia. She shrugs and rolls her eyes.

“Okay, Ward,” she says boredly, “tell us about the gardener.”

“Think he usedta be a priest.” He wrinkles his brow. “I’m fairly sure he was definitely a priest at some point. Always virtue this and God that. And he had priest hands for sure.”

“The hell are priest hands?” Asks Jack.

Ward regards him patiently like someone explaining something simple to a child.

“Priest hands is the sort of hands that are clean and well-kept because people’s mouths. He’s got to put the communion in people’s mouths so they have to be neat and tidy. Dunno why he left the seminary. If he did. ”

“The gardener’s hands were always clean?” Asks Maggie patiently.

“Mm-hm. Manicured. Like he’d never touched dirt.”

His friends said nothing.

“Well? Aren’t you going to say that’s odd?”

“Yeah, Ward,” says Chad, “plenty odd.”

“And that’s not even the oddest!” Ward cries triumphantly, downing his glass.

Talia says something under her breath that is either 'yes’ or 'finally.’

“My nanny.” Ward says conspiratorially, leaning forward and placing both his hands on the table. And everyone leans in too, and there is silence, except for the sound of Jack sipping his ginger ale.

“She was definitely a satan-worshipper.”

“No way.” Says Chad.

Ward pours himself another glass. “Was too! You ought to have heard the rhymes she taught me. All the ones you knew as kid but with the devil in them. Humpty Dumpty, yeah? He’s an egg and he falls off a wall. But in my version, her version, whatever, he falls from heaven for challenging God and raises up armies of kings and men to fight him.”

“Bit weird, yeah.” Concedes Maggie. “But she might have just been religious, right?”

“Nuh. This is real devil egg. She was not a religious woman. Told me church was useless and rules were useless and I was my own master and master of everything around me. And then of course the gardener would tell me the opposite. I don’t think either of them made sense. S'why I’m a firm agnostic.” He declares proudly. 

Talia sits back in her chair triumphantly. There you go, folks, there’s your satanist nanny who fed his ego.

“And another thing that was weird:”

At this, Talia sits up straight. She didn’t know there was more of the story.

“You wouldn’t expect it but the priest- no, not a priest, gardener- and her were best of friends. She might not even have been a real satanist! I think she just did it to bother him, because she’d always laugh when he found out what she’d taught me, an’ then he’d take her aside for a stern word.”

“Um, ” says Chad, “I’m not sure—”  
“Must’ve been quite a word.” Says Jack, waggling his eyebrows.

“Come again?”  
Jack opens his mouth to say something and Maggie elbows him before he can say it.   
“Nothing. They must have been really good friends. ”

“Yeah.” Continues Ward. “Real good friends. The sort that calls each other 'my dear’ and 'angel’ an’ have always got their priest hands on each other’s shoulders an’ waists an’ get fired for canoodling.”

“Wait, what?” Asks Talia.

“Ehhm. Probably, at least. One day I never saw them again an’ my parents said they never worked for us.”  
“Weird.”  
“Yeah”

“Course, they said a lot of things never happened. Like one time I was kidnapped, except I wasn’t.”  
“What?”  
“Mhm. Really was. There was a man with big shoulders an’ a gross old coat an’ we were inna field waiting for a dog an’ there was an army and the dog never showed up an’ the man’s eyes were made of fire. I shit you not, of actual fire. An’ he was mad at me cause I wasn’t the right person.”

“Hang on.” Says Talia. “I don’t quite follow.”  
“I wasn’t the right person. They kidnapped the wrong kid. Simple.”

Chad’s face is an expression of concern. “Did this, um, did this really happen?”  
Ward’s eyes glaze over. “I think so. My parents said I dreamt it.”  
“You probably did.”  
“Didn’t!” He says a bit too loudly. “And it was the nanny’s fault. She was supposed to be watching me. Or maybe she was already fired by then. Or maybe she resigned. I dunno. My parents said I never had a nanny.”

The others look at him with a mix of caution and fear.   
“Let’s get you home, Ward.” Says Chad slowly, shooting a reproachful glance at the others.

After he hauls Ward into his car and drives him away, Talia, Jack, and Maggie wait for a taxi on the corner. It’s dark out, and quiet, and cold.

“Okay, don’t look at me like that!” Says Talia. “I only knew about the weird nursery rhymes! I didn’t know about the kidnapping.”  
“That’s messed up.” Says Maggie quietly to herself. “None of it was real.”  
“No, it was.” Says Talia. “It has to have been.”  
Jack laughs nervously and hails a taxi.

They never ask Ward about his childhood again.


End file.
